Using the reading \"Silverton\'s Gold King Reckoning\"..... What geologic proces
ID: 114849 • Letter: U
Question
Using the reading "Silverton's Gold King Reckoning".....
What geologic process(es) concentrated ore here near Silverton? What problems has mining caused new Silverton and downstream at Durango, Colorado, and for how long have these problems been going on? What happened in 2015 that made these problems worse? Silverton has been reluctant to ask for federal assistance by having these mines added to the EPA's Superfund list. Why is that? What do you think they should do (superfund, or no superfund), and why?
Explanation / Answer
Silverton's Gold King Reckoning:
One the morning of Aug. 5, 2015, a deep pool of acidic, metal-laden water was backed up behind debris in the Level 7 adit of the Gold King Mine on the slope of Bonita Peak, roughly 10 miles north of Silverton, Colorado. The pool had been rising for years, imprisoned in the dark of the mine, yearning, as all water does, to be free.
Outside, on the other side of the wall, a CAT excavator scooped jerkily at the debris and the slope. A few contractors and Environmental Protection Agency employees stood in the hard light of the high-altitude sun, watching.
For most of the summer, the crew had been working down the hill on the Red & Bonita Mine, putting in a concrete bulkhead to control the drainage of toxic water from its tunnels. In late July, workers moved on to the more challenging collapsed portal of the Gold King, which in recent years had become one of Colorado’s most polluting mines. Uncertain how to proceed, the EPA’s on-scene coordinator, Steve Way, postponed the job, pending a Bureau of Reclamation site inspection.
While Way was on vacation, however, his replacement, Hayes Griswold, a thick-necked, gray-haired man in his 60s, ordered work to proceed. He knew the risks. In May, the contractor on the job had noted, in the action plan, “Conditions may exist that could result in a blow-out of the blockages and cause a release of large volumes of contaminated mine waters and sediment.” In situations such as this, the typical first step would be to drill in from above to assess the mine pool’s depth and the pressure it exerted on the dirt and rock. Instead, apparently unsure about where the actual mine portal was, the crew burrowed into the debris.
Should we get out of here?” one worried worker asked.
“Oh, he’s going to be pissed,” another answered. “This isn’t good.”
“What do we do now?” someone else asked, shocked yet oddly calm, as though a household plumbing project had gone awry.
The workers avoided the deluge, but one of their vehicles, left below the jobsite, was submerged in orange slime. Farther downstream, along Cement Creek, the 3 million-gallon “slug” of water and sludge, laden with high concentrations of iron, zinc, cadmium and arsenic, roared past the old town site of Gladstone and another six miles to Silverton, where it cannoned into the waters of the Animas River.
It took about 24 hours for the prow of the slug to navigate the narrow, steep gorge below Silverton and reach the Animas River Valley, seven miles upstream from Durango, where I live.
I spent most of my childhood summers in, on or near the Animas, and often watched the river turn sickly colors: Yellowish-gray after the 1975 tailings pond failure; almost black when Lake Emma burst through the Sunnyside Mine three years later. Back during the 1950s, a uranium mill in Durango dumped 15 tons of radioactive goop into the river daily. Surely, I thought, as news of the catastrophe hit social media, this couldn’t be any worse than that.
Curious, I raced out to examine the river, at a place where the valley, scoured flat by glaciers some 10,000 years ago, slows the Animas to a placid flow. Turbid, electric-orange water, utterly opaque, sprawled out between the sandy banks, as iron hydroxide particles thickened within the current, like psychedelic smoke. Downstream, the Animas was empty, not a sign of Durango’s ubiquitous boaters, swimmers and partiers. For 100 miles along the river, irrigation intakes were shut. After nightfall, the plume slipped through town like a prowler and continued toward the San Juan River and New Mexico and Utah.
In the weeks and months that followed, there was plenty of pain to go around. Durango rafting companies lost hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of potential business. In the small fields of the Navajo Nation, along the San Juan River, corn shriveled without water. For many Navajo, the water is spiritually significant, and seeing it marred was heartbreaking, a bitter reminder of the many times they had borne the brunt of upstream pollution.
Miners first started drilling, blasting and digging holes into the mountainsides of the Silverton Caldera, a 27-million-year-old collapsed magma chamber, in 1872. The San Juan Mountains were still officially the domain of the Utes, who for centuries had followed the game into the high country every summer. Silverton was founded in 1874, and that same summer the Hayden Survey came through, marveling at the complicated mass of mountains, among the last piece of the Lower 48 to be invaded, or even visited, by European-Americans. What they found was a wilderness we can only imagine today. One of the surveyors, Franklin Rhoda, wrote about how, on Uncompahgre Peak, “at an elevation of over 13,000 feet, a she grizzly, with her two cubs, came rushing past us,” and about huge herds of mountain sheep stampeding across rolling, wildflower-spattered highlands.
Less than a decade later, the railroad reached the caldera, opening the doors to humanity and its detritus. Giant mills crowded the valley floors, tramlines hung across meadows. The mountains’ innards were honeycombed with hundreds of miles of mine workings, which served as vast, subterranean acid mine drainage cauldrons. Steep slopes were stripped of their trees, the waters ran gray with mill tailings. The wild lands that Rhoda had marveled at were now industrialized, the grizzly on the run, the Utes pushed onto a sliver of land to the south.
Silverton is no longer the town I stumbled into two decades ago. Both Russ and Dolores are gone. The Silverton Mountain ski area, a stone’s throw from the site of all the acid mine drainage action, has kick-started a fledgling winter tourist economy. Many of the town’s historic buildings have gotten makeovers, and you can now grab a decent bite to eat, even in the dead of winter. Those mining shacks that were $30,000 in the mid-1990s? They sell for 10 times that now. Like many mining-turned-resort towns, Silverton’s chock-full of vacant homes for most of the winter, but long-term rentals are either unavailable or too expensive for the locals — the average wage remains the lowest in the state, even worse than in the chronically depressed counties out on the eastern plains. The absence of a “basic industry” is deeply felt.
For a while, it seemed that this might change. In 2007, Todd Hennis, the current owner of the Gold King, brought an upstart company called Colorado Goldfields to town, buying the Pride of the West Mill and intending to pick up where Fearn had left off. The company put out slick brochures and optimistic videos and press releases, issued shares of stock like it was Monopoly money and pulled in investors, even a handful of locals, on news of rising gold prices. Hennis soon cut ties with the company, however, and ultimately sued, taking the Gold King off the table. And without ever extracting any ore, Colorado Goldfields faded away in 2014, taking with it shareholders’ cash along with another shred of hope that mining could return. When Superfund became inevitable, the rest of the hope fluttered out the window — almost.
This February, Fearn, who has been involved in mining ventures here for 40 years, told me that Superfund will surely kill the possibility of mining the Gold King ever again. But infected with the sort of chronic optimism endemic to mining country, he thought other mines, like his Silver Wing, still had a chance.
Related Questions
Navigate
Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.